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PROLOGUE
NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK
The acrid scent of burnt rubber filled my nostrils as I rushed to the scene. On the cold hard street lay the body of a woman, and it wasn’t just any. It was Donnatella Rossi, my best friend. A fear unlike any other filled me, but I couldn’t concern myself with any of that now. I crouched down and immediately grabbed at her hand which was when I realized how still she was. My shaky fingers fumbled around her wrist as I tried my hardest to detect a pulse, but was wholly unsuccessful with that.
“Donna,” I whispered, softly at first, then a bit more forceful. “Donna!”
The tears that had already sprung to my eyes began to spill forth, even though I tried to squeeze my lids shut for a few seconds hoping to ward them off. It didn’t help and when a tear or two slid down my cheek, I swiped them away. I couldn’t stay like this. I needed to get Donna to the hospital as fast as I could and pray that they could save her.
Opening my eyes, I shook her body and when I did, something warm and wet coated one of my sandaled feet. I looked down, and even though it was turning dark outside, I could still surmise what it was covering the tip of them. It was blood, and in that moment, I feared that I had been too late after all.
My earlier terror grew exponentially, and I rolled my lifeless friend over onto her side. It was then that I saw the large gaping wound on her back, especially on the area bared by the nearly backless dress she was wearing.
“Are you sure you don’t wanna go, Viv? This party is going to be so much fun,” Donna had told me earlier this evening before she left for the club.
I wished now that I would’ve gone with her instead of feigning a headache so I could stay in our hotel room. A million daggers of regret pierced me knowing that not only was my best friend dead, but she had died seemingly alone in a country that we were only visiting. So many questions ran through my head, and I had no answers for a single one of them.
I immediately removed my hand which was now as sticky as my foot and scrambled onto my feet. Donna had mentioned a club earlier, but as I tried to wrack my brain, I couldn’t for the life of me remember ever hearing a name come from her. I was terrible at thinking under pressure, so no matter how hard I tried to remember anything that might help explain what happened, my mind was drawing blanks.
“It’ll be so much fun, Viviana. We’re only here for two more nights. Surely you don’t want to waste the rest of this holiday cooped up in this place,” she’d told me, even waving her hand to emphasize the suite we had been in for the last ten days.
Donna’s father had spared no expense when it came to his daughter and her spontaneous jaunt across the ocean. We’d not come alone, but Donna’s cousin basically ditched us at the airport and he’d barely been seen or heard from since. I doubted that Raphael met the same fate that my friend just had, but I couldn’t say it with any type of certainty. I wasn’t concerned at all with that pompous prick, though. Rumor around Napoli was that he was involved with the mob, not that I kept up with any of the mafia stuff. I was a bookworm, and the most adventure I saw came between the pages of the fictional works that I read.
“You’re always so boring,” she’d told me, half teasing and half insulting me at the same time. “I’m glad the Vaccaro’s know how to throw a party because this sitting around the hotel is not for me.”
“Hey, I’m not sitting around the hotel all night. I’ve been telling you for days that I wanted to do the bus tour of the city at night.” I’d only wanted to do that for the last week, but every time that I mentioned it to Donna, she’d wrinkle up her nose in disgust. “They’re double decker ones like we rode in London.”
The two of us had been best friends since birth, even having shared a nursery together for those first few days of life. We often vacationed together, and a few months earlier, we had both gone to England to see the sights. Granted, Donna was not as impressed with some of them as I had been, but she’d humored me out of something that didn’t extend to the United States. In fact, since arriving in New York City, she’d been fantasizing about the type of men that her cousin was infamously rumored to hang with.
In Italy, the mafia was well known. The Southern port city of Napoli handled its fair share of imports, and none as secretive, or evidently lucrative, as what those men did. I wasn’t born yesterday even though I often kept my head in the clouds. One day, I would be a doctor while Donna wanted to become Italy’s next top supermodel.
I looked down at her face which was pale as snow. Her bright auburn hair was damp from her blood and tousled not from what should’ve been a pleasurable night, but from what looked like a struggle. There were cuts on her arms and throat, most defensive looking in nature. She’d put up a fight against whoever did this, and wanting to preserve evidence, I snatched my hand away from hers in case any DNA was available.
A part of me wanted to continue to plead with her to come back to me, but I knew what a dead body looked and felt like, and this was it. “Oh, Donna,” I cried out, choking back a sob. Those same questions about who, what, why and where came rushing back and weren’t so easily pushed back anymore.
“Don Vaccaro is—” she’d told me before I had cut her off.
“I don’t care if the Pope himself is going to be there. I’m going on the city bus tour tonight and you can either join me, or make sure you put a card on the door if you’re busy by the time that I return.”
That warning had to be placed, because Donna was so beautiful, and sensual, that she attracted attention no matter where she went. I was more of a wallflower, and an introverted one at that so I didn’t garner the same reaction from those of the opposite sex. I was practically invisible, and knowing as much, I was suddenly cursing the fact that I hadn’t gone along with her after all.
I could’ve blended into the background as I so often did, and even if I couldn’t have stopped the actions that had taken place tonight, I could’ve at least known who to finger as the culprits. “Snitches get stitches,” Donna had once told me. “Unless you’re talking about the mafia. With them, you’ll end up dead in ditches.”
“Why did you have to be right about that,” I murmured. I continued to stare at the woman I loved like a sister, and knowing that we would never share a laugh or good cry again had another sob escaping. Someone would pay for this if it was the last thing that I did. I didn’t make many promises, but this was one I now swore that I would.
I took a few calming breaths as I tried to clear my head of my fear and grief, so I could focus more on the last conversation that we’d had together. The Vaccaro’s. The name came up more than once and I knew they were involved. Their names were synonymous with crime in Italy, the family part of the Camorra organization. I remembered reading about them in the headlines more than once. I’d even attended scuola superior, or what I learned was called high school here in America, with one of them. I tried to put a name to a face that now seemed to haunt my vision. He was much taller than me, and had dark hair as well, even though his was a tad lighter than mine. Something else that seemed to strike me as odd now was that he had different color eyes. I’d learned a little about heterochromia from my studies, and I knew it was rare.
Donna had a slight crush on the kid at one time, but she seemed to outgrow that. Now, she tended to go after older men. She referred to them as sugar daddies and I just thought it was gross. Who wanted to have sex with someone as old as their father? Certainly not me. I didn’t know if it was a combination of that visual, or the fact that I was hanging out with a corpse in a darkened alley, but I suddenly had a violent need to throw up.
I turned and covered my mouth with my hand. I heaved once or twice, but nothing came out, so I turned back to Donna. I needed to be able to provide something to the authorities and dropping the Vaccaro name of all ones wouldn’t be the wisest decision I could make, especially if they had nothing to do with it. It would be signing my death warrant, and as much as I would miss my best friend, I was in no hurry to join her in the afterlife.
I needed to think. I closed my eyes as I retraced my steps from earlier. I had immediately taken the subway back to the hotel after the bus tour had ended. The station was a little over three blocks away, and I had nearly made it here when I saw a vehicle. I tried my best to focus on the Italian sports car speeding off into the night. If I could make out a make or model, then maybe it could help me identify her killer. All I could remember, however, was that it was silver. There were three people inside, and one had pushed the body onto the concrete moments before it sped away.
I went to kneel back down and that was when something warm, but hard, wrapped around my wrist. After I was jerked to my feet, I turned in time to see the kid I had thought about earlier staring directly into my eyes. Mine widened in terror while something else flashed in the one brown, and the other green one of his. Nazario Vaccaro. I managed to keep any signs of remembrance to myself and when I was about to speak, he covered my mouth with his free hand.
“You didn’t see anything, Viviana Spataro,” he whispered, and I knew why he spoke my full name. He was confirming that he not only knew who I was, but that I would be sorry if I said anything.
His warning sent a shudder through me and I spoke as soon as he pulled his hand back. “I don’t know what you mean. I—”
